Fifth and sixth grades are in the newsroom, middle school dominates the Clinton campaign's War Room, and seventh-graders have the run of the sports department.
While some cities try to lure athletic teams, mega-retailers or a few large employers to revitalize their downtowns, Little Rock is getting an economic-development boost from an unlikely source: eStem charter schools, which have taken over the old Arkansas Gazette building and is bringing new life to a formerly abandoned part of the city.
The Gazette won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1958 for its courageous coverage and editorials on the Central High desegregation crisis, but lost a drawn-out newspaper war with the Arkansas Democrat and closed on Oct. 18, 1991.
After that, the Gazette's building was used temporarily by the Clinton presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996, and by an occasional retailer. But for the most part, it sat vacant. Over time, the surrounding neighborhood began to slump as well. A grand, wide-columned building across the street once called home by the Federal Reserve is empty. A building catty-corner from the school -- an urban-renewal atrocity that once headquartered Central Arkansas' NBC-TV affiliate -- sits idle too. Before eStem schools opened, you could work downtown and never find reason to pass by the Gazette building. (Full disclosure, the Gazette building is owned by the newspaper I work for, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which leases it to eStem.)
Now it's busy enough that some folks worry about traffic jams, as parents drop their kids off and head to work, or pick them up for lunch.
On July 21, eStem schools opened the doors. There are actually three schools in one historic 1908 building: an elementary, middle and high school. The schools' name stands for the economics of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And their curricula, which emphasize languages like Latin and even Mandarin Chinese, as well as economics and the sciences, are proving to be popular.
| Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas